Illustration © Kaitlynn Copithorne
A few years ago, a man—too young for me and already in a monogamous relationship, but who was very handsome and obviously fancied me—sent me an email with the subject “I know.” When I opened the email, it turned out that what he had discovered, through talking to a mutual friend, was that one of my middle names was Isolde.
Some people might have found that creepy. In fact, my housemate, whose bed I was sitting in when I received the email, was slightly alarmed. I wasn’t though. I was on the precipice of reciprocating his crush and it leading to a doomed relationship. But I thought it was romantic, further proof of the magical quality of my middle name.
My dad had something like a rule that each of his children should have an ‘unusual’ middle name or two. He was an academic and an old hippie who changed his own first name to Moss by deed poll in the 1960s. What ‘unusual’ means in this context, I’m not sure (nor can I remember the exact way he would have described it—he died 20 years ago and I forget what words he used and even the way he spoke). An anachronistic name perhaps, or one taken from a culture not our own. The fact that my father and the mothers of his children (he had four from three different women) chose traditional British first names, of which mine is indicative, shows their desire not to step too far into the eccentric, perhaps in case it stopped their kids from getting middle-class jobs.
My mum didn’t have a job when she met my dad, having signed on for the best part of a decade, and my dad found this embarrassing and told her so. She got one after he left his wife for her, and, also with his encouragement (or perhaps at his insistence), she did her A-levels and went to university. By the time I was born, she was studying for an English degree and lifted one of my middle names from the legend she was reading for it, Tristan and Isolde, thinking it was appropriate because of its Irish and Cornish connections. I have Irish ancestors on both sides and my dad grew up in Falmouth and had a proud Cornish identity.
The romance of Tristan and Isolde is old, probably first told in the 12th century and has had many variations. I first read a version when I was a child and my grandma bought me a collection of stories called The Orchard Book of Love and Friendship, specifically because Tristan and Isolde was included. Underestimating my nascent romanticism, my grandma said that if I wanted to avoid the soppy love stories, I could just read the ones about friends, when I most likely wanted to do the opposite. A lot of the love stories were tragic and I noticed the pattern they followed was quite repetitive—two people loving each other but not being able to be together and then dying.
In Tristan and Isolde, she is married to Tristan’s uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, but her and Tristan start an affair after accidentally drinking a love potion together, originally meant for Isolde and Mark on their wedding night. Eventually, Tristan leaves Cornwall and goes to live in Brittany where, still in love with Isolde, he marries somebody with the same name, Isolde of the White Hands. As a little girl, I thought it was funny that this story had two characters called Isolde in it, whereas I had never even met one person called Isolde in real life. I had also been identifying with the first Isolde up until this point, because of the connection with my middle name. Now I was thrown off and didn’t know which Isolde I was, the one who Tristan really loves or the one he marries as a consolation prize. The story concludes when Tristan is injured and asks for the first Isolde to come and tend to him. She agrees but Isolde of the White Hands lies to Tristan and says that she isn’t coming. Tristan then dies from grief. When Isolde arrives from Cornwall and sees this, she dies as well. The end. The book was illustrated with small winged hearts that flew around the margins by themselves.
When I think about the story now, its themes of betrayal, adultery, and death seem to mirror those of my early life. My dad was married to the mother of my older brother and sister when he first met my mum. After leaving that marriage, he then left my mother a few years later, when I was one, and married another woman. Then he died.
Out of all of these things, I only remember his death, as the betrayals happened before I was born or when I was a baby. Instead, I know these things as stories, told to me by my mother and separately by my older siblings—like folktales that explain my origins, why we live like this, why I feel certain things. I know that what I have been told cannot be completely true or whole, like Tristan and Isolde, the plot ebbs and flows as the years go on. Stories based on the memories of those who were there are distorted by time, people frame events so they don’t appear to be the villain. More was revealed to me as I became an adult. I never got my dad’s side of the story, and of course, I won’t now. His death during my childhood transformed him into a legendary figure who looms over my life, and in particular, my relationships with men, adding a certain depth of sadness and expectation of loss which mutates into boredom if it is unfulfilled.
The man who emailed me when he found out about my middle name later said that he loved me and left his girlfriend, then weeks later took it back and maybe she took him back, I’m not sure. I hadn’t taken any love potion, but still, I had fallen for him suddenly and inadvisably. His fast abandonment left me more hurt than it should have done considering how long we were together, and years later I would still look for his face on a crowded tube escalator even though I knew he didn’t even live in London anymore.
Obviously, I was not just grieving him. The way we had got together had been reminiscent of the story of my parents which still flaps around in my brain, like the flying hearts in the book my grandma gave me, trying to retell itself at any opportunity. I don't want to be Isolde though, or the other Isolde, or Tristan, or either of my parents, and I don’t have to be. The themes of stories about humans are repeated, and love and betrayal often feel universal, but I can actually only be myself.